America’s 2016 elections: black in the nick of time

Race and the prejudices associated with it are the mill and grist of American history. Racism is the single greatest factor shaping American society. In America, the color of a person’s skin paints their life experiences. To understand American politics, is to first understand the country’s racial dynamics. Trying to decipher American politics without seeing race as a dominant factor is likened to baking bread with neither flour nor leaven.

Strangely, although its impact will be publicly understated, race will likely be more decisive in the 2016 elections than in the 2008 election that brought the country’s first Black president into office. In 2008, the election was about the race of one man. The election pivoted on whether Obama could prove to enough Whites that he was not the stereotypical Black they loathed and feared. That people would vote for him did not mean they were not prejudiced. For many, it meant Obama was a rare exception to the general bias they still held as valid. That he had to convince so many people that he was unlike those other Blacks meant the stereotype was still accepted social and political fact. That is was untrue mattered not; in politics, belief is stronger than truth, the established myth of the majority outweighs any objective fact owned by a minority. Those who heraldedObama’s election as the advent of a post-racial society allowed the joy of the moment to eclipse their better judgment. They were akin to a first time visitor coming to someone’s during the moment of a solar eclipse. It would be a leap of naivetéfor the visitor to expect a reoccurrence every visit subsequently made. However, many people were taken by such naiveté by the Obama elections.

Obama was more the Pied Piper than the True Deliverer, more political impresario than biblical Moses. Yet, Black people adorned him in deified garb which ultimately proved ill-fitting. From the outset of the Obama tenure, they determined to seal themselves mute regarding public advocacy of issues specific to the Black community. There was a nearly universal albeit informal pledge not to openly confront the first Black president with matters of racial discrimination of the Black community. They would come to withhold all criticism on all aspects of domestic and foreign policy. This restraint would prove injurious to American itself. Black America had always served as the progressive conscience of the body politic. With that conscience placed in deep freeze, principle and morality were lost to politics. The nation more cynically to the right.

Blacks’ lone benefit was the psychic uplift of knowing one of their own had become the head of the political host. They were lulled into false comfort by the mellifluous rhetoric of the president. Black people walked into a fog of their own making, thinking they would debouch into a new, better America at the end of the misty trip. Sadly, the fog was but in their eyes only. The new America in which they found themselves was the same America they had left. In ways, it was worse.

For the first six years of his tenure, the artful president was sufficiently nibble to dodge matters of a racial nature. Black America had suffered worse than any other part of American during the Great Recession of 2009. However, this greaterpoverty was steady and undramatic. Since Whites too suffered,Blacks would not get any special sympathy. They never did during economic downturns. It is an expected outcome of economic contraction that America’s Blacks would suffer more, just as they enjoy economic booms less than their White counterparts. Just as Blacks came out of the Great Depression comparatively worse, they would fare no better seventy years later in 2009. Blacks being the first to get fleeced and the last to the dinner table remains an abiding tenet of the American political economy. The moderate Obama was not going to lift a finger to alter this secular commandment.

However, in 2014 events began to happen that would not allow themselves to be hidden. While Black people had basically accepted their beleaguered economic station, they thought their basic civil rights were to be honored. They were no longer to be tormented by law enforcement or to be shot or killed simply for being who they are.

In 2014, it became apparent that even this minimalpromise was not categorical. It could be promptly revoked by any police officer, at any time, for any reason or for no good reason at all. Michael Brown was shot in Missouri. Eric Garner was choked to death by a posse of White cops for peddling s few cigarettes in New York City. Garner was only trying to make a few dollars for his poor household. Yet these cops would never dare choke any of those New York bankers who trafficked billions of dollars and brought the global economy to the point of chilling disaster during the 2009 recession. Twelve year old Tamar Rice was killed for playing with a toy gun by White cops who shot first and yet could not be bothered with asking questions later. Walter Scott was shot in the back fleeing a White cop in Charleston who claimed he discharged his firearm because Scott had placed him in mortal danger. How the back of a scared, unarmed middle-aged Black man poses such a danger escapes me. A few miles from that site, a disturbed White supremacist would weeks later walk into a venerable Black church, sit among those in Bible study then shoot dead the Black people who had just befriended this stranger in their midst.

While driving to her first day of work, Sandra Bland was stopped and harassed by a White policeman in Texas. Arrested for the most minor traffic infraction, she was later found dead in her jail cell. Her death was ruled a suicide. The truth will likely remain a mystery. Yet, it remains difficult to believe a 28 year old Black woman would end her life by hanging herself with a trash bag. Suicide fortunately is an uncommon thing;even rarer is that a woman would take her life because of a traffic infraction; even rarer is that a young black woman would choose hanging as her method of self-destruction; even rarer would be that she would come to the point of imagining a trash bag as the instrumentality of her demise and have the ability to convert the bag into a hanging tool. Although possible, the official account does not ring true.

In Ohio, a police officer shot an unarmed Black driver claiming that the man was trying hit and drag him with the car. But evidence shows that the man was driving away from the officer.The harassment goes from the deadly to the ridiculous. In Michigan, a police man recently stopped a Black man, giving him a traffic violation. The reason for the stop was the officer was incensed that the man, when driving past the officer, did not look at the officer with the deference the officer thought he was due. The list goes on. In the south, there are few Black men who cannot tell you of someone they know who has not unjustly suffered death or serious harm at the hand of the law supposed to protect them.

These incidents, though isolated to one person at a time, have awaken the Black community from its “Obama coma.” While willing to tolerate their weakened economic status, many Blacks became incensed by what seemed to be a return to police behavior redolent of the years before the Civil Rights Movement.

Even in this regard, Black people had lived in false comfort. Police behavior had not suddenly grown worse. These incidents as are integral to America as hot dogs and baseball caps. It is just that these injustices were covered. The system would always take the word of the police, even when patently wrong. However, technology has achieved what years of moral entreaty could not. Mobile phones and even police cameras have caught officers in intentional lethal error. They could no longer lie their way out of criminality in every instance. A picture is worth more than a thousand words and a real-time video is worth much more than a single picture.

In response to these injustices, BlackLivesMatter was born as a grassroots movement mostly among young Blacks. Again, they could countenance their economic diminution under the Obama administration. However, they because alarmed that there was no such thing as a routine encounter between the police and a black man. Death spied on each such meeting. The people had not yet graduated from poverty but they thought they had graduated from living in fear. That fear had returned and they were made angry by it.

But BlackLivesMatter could not remain solely an expression against police brutality.The rough treatment by the police was not the cause of Black degradation. It was one of the consequences. Such maltreatment is a form of control and subjugation. The brutalized never prosper and the prosperous are rarely brutalized. Gradually the movement is expanding from its narrow focus to encompass the political and economic issues enchaining black America. This is timely. It will factor into the 2016 elections.

The Obama term nears conclusion. Blacks no longer have to tamp their collective aspirations to ease the job of one man. They can speak without fear of damaging Obama’s political future. They are beginning to do so. Moreso than in the past eight years, they are asking potential presidential candidates to explain what they will do for the Black community.

BlackLives activists have commandeered the stage at rallies of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. They have openly booed Sanders and other Democrats for lack of empathy. This would never have occurred against Obama despite the fact that he openly and frequently shied from addressing issues of social and economic discrimination germane to Black America.

BlackLives have put the Democrats on notice that their next candidate will not be given the same blank pass handed Obama. Democrats not assume the strong voter turnout essential to Obama’s victories. Here, the movement faces several dilemmas. They have largely written off the Republican Party due to the staunch conservatism of their candidates. This makes sense given the oceanic policy difference between Republicans and the bulk of the Black community. However, it also forfeits significant political leverage against the Democrats. The Democrats realize they are the only game in town for Black America. If Blacks want to play, then it will be on the Democrats’ turf.

The only leverage Blacks have is to threaten not to play unless the Democrats better respond to the policy concerns of the community. The great majority of Black voters will go Democratic. The question will be how many Blacks will vote. The Democrat’s path to victory requires a high Black and Latino turnout to overcome the Republican edge among White voters.

The other dilemma Blacks have will be who to support in the Democratic primaries. Objectively, the policy stance of Bernie Sanders on economic issues advance Black interests more than the positions of any other Democratic candidate. Unfortunately for Sanders, he has no well-known Blacks around him; he does not speak in a language and cadence familiar to the people. Hillary Clinton has deep ties to the Black political establishment and is better versed at speaking in ways comfortable to the average Black person. She also has her husband Bill.

Bill speaks in the tenor of the south. He knows how to sugarcoat his words to make the bitter taste like the best honey. The man remains widely popular among Black Americans despite the fact that policies he enacted in the criminal justice system, education, social services reform, financial deregulation, and economic trade have been severely inimical to Black America. If Clinton is the friend of Blacks, we would fare better by having more enemies. However, Blacks still dance at the mention of his name. We seem to be mesmerized by showmanship instead of taking the time to analyze whether the performer is doing what is good for us.

Thus, Clinton will call forth Bill and the old Black political guard to appeal the community. However, her real ties are to the corporate establishment that likes the status quo just fine. By delving into politics, BlackLifesMatter will pit themselves against their political leaders. If they remain true to their professed cause, this also included president Obama.

This potential collision may not only influence the presidential sweepstakes but may alter the nature of Black leadership in ways unanticipated just a year ago. The 2008 election was about the race of one man. The 2016 edition may be decided by the political action or inaction of one race, those who have returned to being Black just in the nick of time.